


Lost Souls in a Brave New World

by CourtneyFG



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, F/F, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 10:38:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5160671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourtneyFG/pseuds/CourtneyFG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The years is 237AG and technology rains supreme. Korra is a Avatar without a purpose in life and she meets an interesting lot of people along her road to finding out what it means to be The Avatar.</p><p>This is really my imagining of the Avatar universe in our future with LoK characters.</p><p>I've never written sci-fi before so wish me luck.</p><p>Character list and tags will be updated as the story progresses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Over 300 years ago the world lived in peace, benders and non benders lived in balance, the four nations were separate yet harmonious and the Avatar, a sole being of light, balance and justice, master of the four elements, roamed the world helping people and villages with their problems, be it physical or spiritual The Avatar was there to help but that all changed when the Fire Nation attacked. For 100 years the world suffered in chaos under the Fire Nation’s tyranny, the Air Nation was all but wiped out and the Avatar was missing. A lot of people credit that war as the start of the modern age, the Fire Nation flourished and with it so did the industrial revolution, they created war machines such that the world had never seen, it was truly terrifying, yet to the mechanically minded the progress they made was astounding. That war came to an end when the young Avatar returned to the world and restored balance but the world was never the same again.

After 70 years of building harmony between the nations, the balance between benders and non-benders was forgotten. Non-benders had become unofficial lower class, bending triads ruled the streets and asserted their dominance. A group calling themselves the Equalists tried to start a revolution to restore the rights of non-benders and we all know how well the actions of extremists work. The Avatar quickly took down their leader before they could kill too many people but the Avatar also knew that something more needed to be done. The Avatar formed the Four Nation Representative Committee (what would later become, the United Nations) that made a charter protecting the rights of all people worldwide. And so Balance was returned to the world.

Over the next 167 years it was the work of one family that really made a difference to bringing about the modern world, The Sato Family. A family of non-benders who strived to make the world accessible to non-benders. Inspired by benders, they created gadgets, machines, appliances; a water benders can make ice to cool food, they invented the refrigerator, a fire bender can self regulate body temperature, they invented the thermostat, air benders can manipulate air currents to glide, they invented the aeroplane. It wasn’t long before people started to realise that everything that benders could do, non-benders now could too and so could other benders. The Non-benders had truly gained their equality, not through revolution but through evolution.

The benders soon had to strive to advance their own techniques in an effort to feel that sense of importance they once had. Generations of benders worked at refining their abilities, earth bends pushed themselves to be able to produce glass, fire benders could now produce lasers, water benders studied to become blood bending healers. They strived to do things that couldn’t be replicated by non-benders. For some it was to show superiority for others it was to help push the limits of technology and work with the inventers and engineers to make things that were not possible to be created without shared skills. But not all benders could push their capabilities that far, in fact only a small minority could, those who couldn’t simply failed to flourish in the new world and in turn became to new second class. Many of them becoming homeless, forgotten by a world that sees them as useless.

This is the world in which our story is set. Technology thrives why benders struggles to keep up. A world connected by wires (or wireless). A world in which anything can happen, there are even humans living on Mars. But the world is dangerous place and many old grievances have not been forgotten. This is not a love story, although there is love in it. This is not a story of justice, although there is plenty of that as well. It is however the story of an Avatar and how she came to carve out a place for herself in a world that had proven that The Avatar was as superfluous as the benders it shoved to the streets.


	2. Morning.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some mornings are more frustrating than others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thought I would add the first chapter to give you more of an idea of the style I'm going for for this story. I still haen't decided wether or not this will be continued.

Sunlight filtered through the dark clouds and illuminated the ever-growing skyline. It wasn’t a terrible view from her penthouse, some days (if the smog was thin enough) Korra could almost see the ocean but her favourite view was at night, when the artificial lights from the buildings and the traffic whizzing past below created a multi-coloured haze that was almost magical. As Korra watched the rain fall down across Republic City her fingers ideally waved over her cup of tea sitting on the side table next to her. The spoon in her tea slowly swirled around without her ever touching it, while steam slowly rose only to condense on her fingers. Watching her someone might guess that she was a metal bender manipulating the spoon or a water bender and the spoon was caught in the currents of the swirling tea or if they’re really stretching you could guess that she was a fire bender and the movements of the tea and the spoon were somehow a consequence of a heating technique but they’d would be wrong. The truth was not even Korra knew what type of bending it was, most probably a mixture of all three but she tried not to think about it too much. The idea that she had control over all the elements but she never got to use them was incredibly disheartening and made her feel useless in the evolving world, at least the world still valued her as a ceremonial figure or she’d probably be completely lost in the world.

Korra took a sip from her tea and looked up at the scrolling news feeds that displayed across her windows. People said that it was a marvellous time to be alive, with the recent success in colonising Mars and the innovative technologies cropping up every other week but Korra wasn’t convinced. She’d spent most of her formative years being shunted around the world from one training facility to the next and she hadn’t seen anything to make her think there was anything special about this time in history.  
The news reports were as boring as ever.

8:50am, 22°C, patches of rain. Stock Market up. Murder suicide in the Dragon Flats Borough. Next news update @ 9:20am.

Korra took a trip around her apartment to checking all the rooms checking to make sure she was alone before making a stop in the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea, which she took with her to the guard station down the hall from her apartment. She gave a quick knock which was promptly answered by a skinny young guard who didn’t look old enough to shave (though she knew he had to be at least 18), she observed that he did have good bone structure and well developed musculature and if she had a thing for younger guys she’d definitely give him a roll.

‘Avatar Korra, Ma’am.’ He snapped his legs together and saluted, his fine features becoming ridged and taught and Korra had to struggle to stifle her smirk, because this was going to be easier than expected. Through the open door she could see every room of her apartment, except the private areas, displayed on the monitors, however ALL rooms had an audio feed that also came through. The White Lotus had been in charge of her training and protection since her parents discovered that she was The Avatar and in their efforts to ensure her safety from potential outside threats, they had also effectively stripped her of all privacy. She held the teapot out as an offering to the guard and gave her best innocent smile.

‘I brought you some tea, I know you’ve been on duty all night and I figured you could use a smoke break,’ His expression softened and she took that as a sign to continue, ‘besides I have some *cough* personal business to take care of and it might be a touch awkward for you to be listening in.’ she smiled coyly at the poor boy whose face was now a deep shade of crimson.

‘err, uhh, hum.’ He stammered ‘Thank you Ma’am.’ he replied before he took the teapot and swiftly ducked past Korra before making his way down the hall to the small balcony at the end.

‘The young ones are always the easiest to fool.’ Korra chuckled to herself as she re-entered her apartment.

Once the door was closed she almost considered taking care of herself like she’d led the guard to believe but her moments of ‘un-surveillanced’ time were a preciouses thing and she wasn’t going to waste them on things she could do any old time (she really didn’t care about the guards listening to her get herself off, she’d grown up under their constant vigilances and knew she couldn’t keep any secrets from them, well she did have a couple). She made her way over to the couch and dug under the cushions for her crappy old laptop and (almost) turn of the century smart phone. The old cell networks had been abandoned when Future Industries had introduced the coms chip (a chip in the shape of a half cog that was implanted into the neck behind the ear and acted like a phone transceiver and data hotspot) but just because they were abandoned didn’t mean they weren’t operational, the telecoms had just stopped charging for access to the old networks because it cost more to process the bills than the revenue that would have been made and they couldn’t shut them down because they were integrated too well into, well everything. This was one of her few unmonitored connections to the outside world, her coms chip mirrored her data straight to the White Lotus’s headquarters so they knew what she was up to at all times, they also restricted what information she was allowed access too. Her secret laptop was the only way she could get unfettered access to the real news among other unauthorised sites.

The world was in the middle of an unprecedented era of peace and her duties as The Avatar weren’t really needed, sure there was still crime and violence in the world, but the police had that under control. Her role had been reduced to being a symbol of peace, balance and unity, with the exception of helping during natural disasters. She really didn’t understand the need for her seclusion and isolation from the world, it’s not like there were any rogue terrorist organisations out there trying to kill The Avatar, any authority she had as purely symbolic. She’d been convinced, since she was about 15, that there was more happening in the world than what she’d been informed about so she’d set out to keep herself up to date of everything that was happening. So far it had only been the occasional triad war, some pirating on the open seas and a case of industrial espionage (apparently Cabbage Corp had their spies working at Future Industries and managed to sabotage one of their factories causing a massive explosion and numerous deaths), it didn’t seem like much worth knowing but at least she knew about them.

She plugged the phone into the side port and fired up the old computer, only to be greeted by an electric fizzing noise and a pop that came from the phone that was over seven decades old.

‘FUCK!’ This was her third phone in as many months and they weren’t easy items to come by, one because they went out of production 50 years ago and two because she had to loose her guards to procure one. She checked the time on the computer screen, 9:15am, which meant that she had 5 minutes before the guard would be back at his post. She closed up the laptop and hastily shoved it along with the broken phone into her bag that had been resting on the side of the couch. She reached up and touched her coms button and clearly vocalised ‘Bolin.’ She heard the phone ringing in her ear while she moved to her room to get changed into her day clothes. After a few rings Bolin Answered her call.

‘Hey Avatar? What can I do for you this bright and sunny day?’

‘Sunny? Really Bo, there’s like 5 rays of light shining through the clouds.’

‘Better than none.’ Bolin was always the optimist. He was also her closest friend although the White Lotus, weren’t aware of it, they believed him to just be the guy who ran the local homeless shelter where she volunteered, so she was careful to keep all monitored communications between them professional. ‘So, what has you calling this early in the morning?’

‘I was wondering if you needed an extra set of hands for the lunch shift? I kinda promised Old Rusty that I’d be there today and that I’ve give him an extra large helping.’

The Old Rusty dialogue was her code for needing to visit Tech Support. Tech Support was the name of the underground go-to-guy, the guy regular tech support visited when they needed tech support. He usually specialised in advanced hacking software and restricted hardware but he was also the most reliable source for old tech that was still functional, like the phone she needed to gain access to the old network. Nobody ever got to meet Tech Support, he was a very private man, all business transactions were handled by his assistant, which wasn’t so bad, she was hot and she always gave Korra a discount so she didn’t mind that she didn’t get to meet guy.

‘You know I’ll never say no to an extra set of hands, just drop by when you can.’

‘I’ll see you soon then, bye.’

There was an added bonus to Bolin running the homeless shelter and that was that the White Lotus hated to get too close to the place, they always stayed in the car out on the street, which suited her just fine because it meant that she could slip out the back door without them realising that she was even gone. She hated having to deceive them like that but she also hated that she was 23 and treated like prisoner under house arrest, so it never left her feeling guilty. She knew one day that she would have the authority to tell the White Lotus to, ‘Fuck off!’ but apparently one of her predecessors had given the instruction that ‘The Avatar must be protected until they turn 25.’ Korra only had to wait two more years, but for now, she had to put one her sweetest smile and go tell the guards she needed a lift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think, Like I said I haven't decided if I'll continue this, it all depends on if it is something you all want to read, so drop me a line and let me know.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know if this sounds interesting and I'll keep it going. It's an idea I've been kicking around for awhile and I've reached a point in Staring on a Train that I'm finding hard to write, so I need something else to keep the writing flowing.
> 
> for the purposes of this story most things that happened during 'Legend of Korra' are part of history but it was a different Avatar that did those things. This story will have Korrasami but it's not the main focus.


End file.
